The Singer's Gun (17 page)

15.

Elena, buying a Social Security card at the Russian Café:

She arrives a half-hour early and chooses a table by the window, facing out. The Russian Café on 1st Street is a few feet below street level and when Elena sits down she can only see legs passing above the bank of snow, flickering shadows of high boots and dark overcoats. It is late afternoon and the snow is unceasing.

The café is warm, but Elena is shivering. She takes off her coat but keeps her hat and scarf on, she orders a mug of tea and a muffin—four dollars, which is her entire budget for the day because she’s been saving all her money for the transaction that’s about to occur. The place is nearly empty. An older man in a tweed jacket sits alone at a table on the other side of the door, reading a newspaper and sipping a cappuccino. A couple sits some distance away, laughing at a private joke. They are young, college students perhaps, and the woman’s face is flushed in the warmth of the room. Elena holds the tea near her face and closes her eyes for a moment, waiting for the heavy footsteps, the door flung open and the Homeland Security badge flashed in her face and the shouting, the handcuffs, the guns; but when she opens her eyes the room is still tranquil, candlelight on red wallpaper and the shadows of pedestrians still flickering across the top of the window before her and the snow falling outside, the waitress behind the counter still chatting in Russian on her cell phone, the man in the tweed jacket still turning the pages of the newspaper. Of course. Why would her arrest be so dramatic? She isn’t armed or dangerous. She’s a twenty-two-year-old who goes without dinner too frequently and gets dizzy if she stands up too fast. No need for storm troopers, for the waving of guns. In a moment the man in tweed will take one last sip of his cappuccino, fold his newspaper unhurriedly and stand up from the table, buttoning his jacket as he stands. He will move toward her slowly, he will reach into an inside pocket and remove a police badge and hold it up with a wink as he removes the handcuffs from his belt, speaking confidentially in a friendly voice,
You have the right to remain silent,
and by morning she will be on a northbound plane with an X stamped on her passport. She sips the tea to calm herself and tries to eat the muffin. An hour earlier she had been desperately, light-headedly, agonizingly hungry, but now she can taste nothing and it’s difficult to swallow. The man in the tweed jacket turns a page of his newspaper. Elena clenches her hands around the mug of tea, trying to look everywhere at once and bracing herself for the sting; the men exploding through the door with guns drawn or the couple across the room standing up and pulling badges from their hipster jean pockets. Every catastrophe has a last moment just before it; as late as eight forty-four
A.M
. on the morning of September 11, 2001, it was still only a perfect bright day in New York. But the couple remains in conversation, the man in the tweed jacket sips his cappuccino and reads, the waitress stands by the glass door looking up the steps to the sidewalk and street.

“Still snowing,” the waitress says. She’s a young woman with straight blond hair and brown eyes, a small scar on her forehead, and she smiles when Elena looks up. “It will be deep tonight, I think.”

The door opens a moment later and the man is at her table almost instantly, sliding into the chair across from her and unbuttoning his overcoat, his face red with cold.

“Gabriel.” He extends a cold hand. “You must be Elena.”

She nods mutely.

“It’s freezing,” he says. “Jesus.” He waves at someone behind her, presumably the waitress, removes a tissue from his coat pocket and blows his nose. “Excuse me,” he says to Elena, and the waitress has appeared with a latte. She sets it down in front of him and Gabriel kisses her cheek. “Illy,” he says, “you’re a saint. Thank you.” The waitress smiles and steps back, watching them. Gabriel leans forward across the table and beckons for Elena to lean forward too. His breath is hot against her ear. “I apologize for this,” he murmurs, so softly that she has to strain to hear him, “but I need you to go to the back with Ilieva, and do what she says. It’s a security precaution that my cousin insists on. Please don’t take it personally.”

“Here,” Ilieva says, “come with me, please.” Elena stands and follows her past the brightly lit pastry case, down the red corridor past the bathroom, until Ilieva opens a door marked
Employees Only
and Elena follows her into the storeroom. It is a cramped space filled with boxes and milk crates. An enormous glass-fronted fridge hums in a corner, filled with white cake boxes and ice-cream tubs. Ilieva closes and locks the door behind them.

“Please take off your clothes,” she says.

“What?”

“For the wires,” Ilieva says. “It is to check for the wires.”

“The wires?”

“Wiretapping. The recordings. I’m sorry, my English . . .”

“Oh. I understand.” She begins to take off her clothes. It’s warm in the storeroom, but she can’t stop shivering.

“Your bra also,” Ilieva says. She picks up each article of clothing as Elena removes it, patting it down before she returns it to Elena, presumably feeling for recording devices. When Elena is fully dressed again Ilieva makes an unembarrassed search of Elena’s coat pockets. She removes and examines the wad of bills, replaces them and continues searching. “No handbag?”

“No handbag,” Elena says.

When Elena goes back out into the restaurant Gabriel is where she left him, drinking his latte. He smiles when he sees her but doesn’t speak. Ilieva appears a moment later and murmurs something in his ear. He nods.

“I apologize sincerely,” he says to Elena. “I know it’s intrusive, to say the least. My cousin’s a little paranoid about security.”

“I understand.”

“I hate it,” Gabriel says. “The whole procedure. It just seems somewhat necessary these days. The current political climate, et cetera. But anyway, listen, may I buy you a sandwich?”

“Oh, there’s no need, I—”

“Seriously,” he says gently. “You’re looking a little pale.”

All at once she is desperately hungry again.

Later on it’s difficult to remember the conversation, except that it’s effortless and that hours pass before Ilieva brings the check and the snow outside the window sparkles blue and amber in the lights of the street.

“We close early,” Ilieva says apologetically. “For the snow.” The café is empty but for an older couple eating dessert nearby.

“Bear with me for one last absurd ritual,” Gabriel says softly, “and then you’re free to work in the United States of America. Will you do exactly as I say for a moment?”

“Yes,” Elena whispers.

Gabriel opens his wallet and slides a twenty into the check folder. “That’s for the food and drink,” he tells her quietly. “Now put in your share.” His tone leaves no doubt as to his meaning, and all at once it is the last moment before potential catastrophe again: the whole evening has unwound to this point,
now
, and it’s too late again. Elena reaches into her left coat pocket, where the precious stack of bills that she’s been accumulating for months resides, but the police don’t break down the door. Perhaps it won’t happen. Perhaps she’ll walk out with a forged passport and a Social Security number, exactly as promised. “Turn the folder so that it opens away from that couple,” Gabriel murmurs, “and slide the money in. Don’t count it—good—now put the folder on the table and look at me as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.”

Ilieva takes the check folder and Elena is alone with Gabriel for a moment, and the music playing in the café at that moment sounds like a Russian lullaby. Ilieva reappears with the folder and two glasses of red wine.

“Your change,” Ilieva says. “A pleasure, as always.”

Gabriel raises his glass. “Red wine means the count was correct,” he says softly. “If she’d brought water, I’d be out the door by now. Cheers.”

“What are we toasting?”

“My last job,” he says, “and your future gainful employment.”

“Really? I’m your very last?”

“Well, I have one more tomorrow, actually. But
my second-to-last job
doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?” He’s reaching into an inside pocket of his jacket, and he passes her the envelope so casually that Elena almost doesn’t see it until it’s on the table. It’s the kind of envelope that film developers use for photos. “Here are some vacation pictures,” he says. “You can look at them later.”

She takes the envelope and puts it in her bag and the moment of transaction is over so quickly that she’s almost unsure it happened. He’s still holding up his wineglass, and she smiles.

“Well,” Elena says, “congratulations. I assume this isn’t the easiest line of work.”

“That’s just it,” he says. “It
is
easy. I could do this forever. But I want something different. What will you do with your new-found legality?”

“I’ll stop washing dishes for a living. I’ll stop posing naked for photographers. I don’t know. Anything.”

Gabriel goes quiet for a moment, sipping his wine. “Listen, I shouldn’t ask probably,” he says suddenly. “This is probably silly of me, but do you have any office skills? Can you type?”

She nods.

“I started a new job last month,” he says. “It’s nothing that exciting, but I’ve been told to find a new secretary for my division . . .” She listens for some time to the details of the position, she sips her wine and then the glass of water that follows, and she is stricken by a sense that has come over her before in moments of unreality; it’s as if she’s stepped outside herself and is observing the scene from afar. At a small table in the Russian Café in a snowstorm she talks to the man she met a few hours earlier and laughs as if she’s always known him, just as if they’re two old friends out for dinner on a snowy night in New York. Just as if the envelope that Anton slid over the table hadn’t contained a Social Security card and an impeccably forged American passport.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel says in the snow outside the restaurant, walking toward the Williamsburg Bridge, “it’s difficult to explain. I just want, I’ve always wanted a different kind of life than this. This will sound strange, I mean, I know it’s crazy, but I always wanted to work in an office.”

“You have a corporate soul?”

She’s mostly joking, but Gabriel nods as if she isn’t and says, “Exactly. Yes.”

Late at night on the bridge the cold is deep and absolute. The lights of the Domino Sugar Factory shine over the river, and the snow is still falling. Gabriel tells her he’s spending the evening with his parents in Williamsburg. They walk together, talking, and a boat moves silently over the dark water far below.

On the far side of the bridge he calls a car service for her on his cell phone and they stand together waiting for it to arrive, stamping their feet to keep warm until the black car pulls up to the curb. “Let me give you my business card so you can call me about the job. There’s just one thing I have to tell you,” he says as he gives it to her. “About my name . . .”

The car takes her away from there to the apartment building in East Williamsburg. She leans her head against the window to look up at the snow and it seems at that moment that it’s going to get easier now, that the long nightmare of hunger and dishwashing and posing naked is almost over; there’s a chance at a job here in her beloved city, something different, health insurance, a new life. The driver, already paid by Gabriel/Anton, grunts something about the neighborhood when she says goodnight. Elena lets herself in through the first door, a steel gate that clangs shut behind her. Her boyfriend is lying on her bed when she opens the door to her bedroom; she can’t suppress a gasp. They’ve been talking about moving in together, and she forgets sometimes that she’s given him a key. He grins at her and puts down the book he was reading,
The Botany of Desire
, green-gold apples resplendent on the dust jacket.

“I let myself in,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I’m glad you’re here.” She opens the closet door and steps behind it, hidden from his view. She’s taking her clothes off; the thought of undressing for Ilieva in the storeroom returns to her, and she blinks and tries to erase Ilieva’s face from her mind. “What time is it?”

“Almost eleven,” he says. “Where’ve you been?”

“I went out with a girl from work. Jennifer.”

The American passport is cool to the touch. She takes it from her coat pocket and opens it quickly, hidden from Caleb’s view by the closet door. The light in the closet is bad but the document seems perfect. The photograph that she mailed to a post-office box two weeks earlier stares back at her.

“A waitress?”

“Yes,” Elena says. She’s running her fingers over the letters.
Nationality: United States of America.
“She works mornings, usually. You haven’t met her. How long have you been here?”

“Oh, a few hours,” Caleb says. “Missing you rather urgently, I might add. Are you naked yet?”

Later on in bed she opens her eyes to watch the movements of his shoulders above her, the side of his face, his neck. His eyes are clenched shut. She watches him intently. Trying to concentrate on Caleb only, trying not to pretend that Caleb is anyone else.

16.

It took nearly an hour to clear Customs in Rome. The cat’s health records and proof of rabies vaccination were examined at great length, it seemed to her, by customs officials while the cat glared at everyone through the bars of the carrying case. When she was finally allowed to leave the airport Elena took a silver shuttle train to the central station, Termini, and found that there was some time to kill before the next train to Naples.

There were men posted in Termini, a few women too, police officers with dark uniforms and sharp white leather belts. She tried to walk casually and to carry the cat on the side facing away from the police officers, deeply afraid and simultaneously cursing herself for paranoia. It was morning in Italy, three
A.M
. in New York. She had another thirteen hours before she failed to show up for her appointment with Broden, and she imagined that still more time would pass after that missed appointment before the machine of inquiry would begin to roll into motion, before agents arrived at her apartment, before her passport was tagged—perhaps hours, perhaps a day—but she was traveling on the Canadian passport, not the American; would that make a difference? She wasn’t sure. Nothing made sense anymore. She was exhausted but wired, scattered, alive, her thoughts moving in circles like a flock of dark birds.

Elena carried the cat and the suitcase onto the first train to Napoli, and watched the sun rise over the Bay of Naples from the train. In a small lurching bathroom onboard the train she let the cat out of the carrier, opened the can of tuna she’d brought from Brooklyn and watched while the cat ate frantically and purred. Some hours later she found herself standing in front of the pink hotel on the island of Ischia, unsure what to do next. The restaurant seemed open, a waiter moving about setting the tables, but all at once she needed more time. She didn’t know what to say to Anton; they had left it that she would call him once she had the cat.

Elena turned away from the hotel and continued on down the cobbled street, which curved and opened into a large piazza. There were three cafés here, their outdoor areas distinguished by different styles of umbrellas, and a harbor full of painted boats. She stood for a while in the sunlight by the water’s edge, looking at the boats—they moved against each other in the harbor ripples, soft sounds of wood on wood—and at the far side of the harbor a sheer face of rock rose up to become a tree-crested hill, connected to Sant’Angelo by only the narrowest strip of beach. The weight of the cat was suddenly too much; she turned back to the piazza and made her way to the closest café area, to a table shaded by an immense white umbrella. Her heart was pounding and her head was light, the sleeplessness of the previous night falling down around her. She was dizzy. The waiter approached and said something. She stared at him blankly and smiled, a little panicked. He repeated himself in what sounded like halting German.

“He’s asking if you’d like some water and a menu,” a woman at the next table said conspiratorially.

“Oh,” Elena said. “Thank you. Um, si. Per favore. And also a café latte. Please.”

Two men were sitting together a few tables away. They had been talking intently over coffee but at the sound of her voice one of them looked over his shoulder, did a double-take, glanced at the cat, stood up slowly and came to sit at her table. His hair was longer than she remembered, and he looked like he’d been spending some time in the sun.

“Elena,” he said.

Later Anton held her in the room as she lapsed into sleep, looking up at the blue of the ceiling. The cat climbed on top of him and fell asleep on his stomach.

Later still Anton went down to the pay phone in the piazza, found his phone card and dialed a number from memory.

“I wish you’d just let me call you from my cell phone,” he said when Aria answered. “I think it’d be cheaper.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Aria said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I have the package. It came yesterday.”

“Excellent. You haven’t opened it?”

“No.”

“Good. Don’t. You’ll think I’m paranoid, but I’m going to call you back in three minutes from the pay phone on my corner. Tell me the number of the pay phone on Ischia.”

“You’re not serious,” he said, but she apparently was. He stood by the phone for a few minutes until it rang.

“Your contact will be in the restaurant at ten
P.M
. tonight,” she said. There was static on the line.

“I still want twenty thousand dollars,” he said.

“I’m paying you eighteen. The money should be in your checking account by now.”

“Aria,” he said, “what do these people do?”

“You want back in the business now?”

“I need to know,” he said. “You said in the restaurant that night that they’re import-exporters, but what do they ship?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I was lying awake thinking last night,” said Anton. “It’s too quiet here, and I’ve been by myself. I can’t sleep sometimes. If they’re going to blow up the subway system, Aria, I’ll tell Sophie about Harvard myself.”

“Really,” she said. “If I told you they were smuggling bomb materials, you’d tell Sophie about Harvard?”

“I would tell everyone about everything,” he said.

Aria was quiet for a moment.

“If you don’t want to be my business partner anymore,” she said, “the least you could do is stay out of my way.”

“Explosives are a step too far for me, Aria. I take the subway to work.”

The silence was so long this time that he thought he might have lost her. After a moment he said her name.

“I’m still here,” she said.

“Then tell me what they’re shipping.”

“I suppose it can’t do too much harm to tell you, at this point. You know how hard it is to immigrate to the United States,” she said.

“Well, yeah, that was the foundation of our business plan. What does that have to do with . . .?”

“They help people enter the country. That’s all.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite—”

“Fine. What they do, Anton, is they help lovely young ladies from ex-Soviet republics start new lives in the United States. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Trafficking,” he said. “Aria, please tell me you’re joking.”

“We’ve always helped immigrants once they arrived in the country,” Aria said. “Is it such a stretch to help them arrive in the first place?”

“How did you get involved with these people?”

“The importers? They’re the people who brought in Natalka,” she said.

“Who?” The name caught briefly on some outcropping of memory, but tore off and left only hanging shreds. Anton knew a Natalka. He had met a Natalka. An impression of red lipstick, of cigarette smoke. A memory, or was it just that he’d met so many Russian girls who wore bright lipstick and smoked cigarettes that he heard a Russian-sounding name and his memory offered up a stock photograph? He couldn’t quite see her face.

“Natalka,” Aria said. “You sold her a passport.”

And she snaps into focus. Natalka’s in her twenties, but her hair is white. Not platinum blonde white, like the Norwegian girl whom he’d dated briefly in high school. Natalka’s hair is white-silver, white-decades-early, cut in a slightly uneven bob. In a recess of memory she sits across from him at a table in the Russian Café, raises a cigarette to her lips and smiles. She inhales with the languid desperation of a girl who will very soon be out of cigarettes and is trying to make the current one last as long as possible. Ilieva comes to the table, and when she asks to take their order Natalka smiles at Ilieva’s accent and speaks to her in Russian. Ilieva comes alive at the sound of her own language; they talk for a moment and then Ilieva brings a small black coffee, into which Natalka pours so much sugar that Anton half-expects the coffee to congeal into sludge. He realizes that she’s trying to make her coffee as meal-like as possible, and his heart drops a little. He buys her a sandwich and watches her eat.

“How did you come here?” he asks her. It’s a question he’s been asking almost everyone lately. Their stories are seldom uninteresting. He has half-baked ideas about writing something someday—working title:
A Totally Fictional Guide to Immigrating Illegally to New York
—and to this end he’s been taking some notes in the evenings.

“In a box,” Natalka says. “I came here in a box.” She lights a new cigarette with shaking hands, and lifts it quickly to her lips. She’s gone pale; her smile has vanished; he presses her no further. And it’s only several years later, holding a pay-phone receiver to his face on the island of Ischia, that he understands what she meant.

“Shipping containers. It’s shipping containers, isn’t it?”

“Bright boy,” said Aria.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“To Natalka? No idea. She put me in touch with the people who imported her in exchange for a discount on her passport, and that was the last time I spoke with the girl.”

“I don’t think it’s right.”

“No,” she said, “of course you don’t.”

“Aria, you know what happens to girls like that.”

“All of them? Anton, grow up. It’s a way of entering the country. What would their lives be like, in these places they come from? These radioactive little Ukrainian towns, Anton, these dark little villages without jobs, these fallen-down countries where everything’s corrupt? It isn’t that there’s no industry in these places, it’s that they
are
the industry in these places. They can be strippers and call girls there or strippers and call girls here, and here at least they stand a chance. When you think about it, Anton, do you disagree with me?”

“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t disagree with you.”

“Besides, you’re helping a friend.”

“You’re many things to me, Aria, but
friend
isn’t exactly—”

“No,” she said, “I mean you know someone who’s arriving on the next boat.”

“What? Who?”

“Ilieva went back to Russia two months ago. Her grandmother was dying and she wanted to see her, but then she couldn’t get a visa to come back to the United States and she got stuck over there. Think of everything she’s done for us over the years.”

“She’s done a lot.”

“So do something for her. Go downstairs to the restaurant tonight, and give the FedEx envelope to the men who are bringing her back to New York. The interaction’s over in five minutes, and you’re done. Ilieva’s boat moves unmolested into the port at Red Hook. The shipping container is driven away and unloaded, and she’s back in New York on Monday morning. You can come home tomorrow, make up a story for Sophie about a nervous breakdown or something, and life resumes its former course.”

“And life resumes its former course,” he said. He was watching Elena. After they’d made love in the hotel room and slept for a while she had wanted to go swimming, and he’d left her to change while he came down to call Aria. Now Elena was crossing the piazza barefoot, wrapped in a towel and headed for the beach. “Why does she have to come back in a shipping container? Couldn’t you have just sent her a passport?”

“There wasn’t time. She told me she was in some kind of trouble. She wanted to get out of Russia quickly and it was the best I could do on short notice.”

“Aria, promise me you’ll leave me alone after this.”

“This is the last job I’ll ever ask you to do.”

Elena stepped out of sight along the beach.

“Do you remember that night,” he said, “when we were fourteen and I cut your hair in your bedroom?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about it today. There was a certain time in our lives when we didn’t have to become so . . . well, so adversarial, for lack of a better word.”

“I don’t consider you an enemy,” Aria said.

“What do you consider me, then?”

“Listen,” she said, “I’d love to stay on the line and talk, but I have things to do. It’s just business, Anton. Remember that.”

“Just business,” he repeated.

“Goodbye, Anton,” Aria said, and she disconnected before he could respond. He hung up the phone and followed after Elena.

She was in the water. He watched from the beach while she swam out to the breakwater, pale and full of grace. She swam beautifully. She climbed up onto the breakwater rocks, turned and waved at him. That was the moment when he knew; he saw the slight swell of her body when she turned toward him, the weight of her breasts when she raised her arm, and he understood why she had come to him.

“Oh my God,” he said, aloud. Elena turned her back on him to look out toward Capri, a small hopelessly erotic figure with his shorts clinging wet around her legs (she’d brought no swimsuit from New York), and the feeling of falling in love was literal: a fall, handholds breaking away in the descent. She swam back to him and he wrapped her in a towel. She sat curled up tight against his side, not quite shivering but not quite warm either, and he held her close with his arm around her shoulders. While she was out at sea he had taken off his wedding ring. Now he buried it with his free hand, pushing it as deep as it would go into the sand.